Each year, industrial, medical and other procedures, which involve the use of X-ray and other photographic film, produce great quantities of used film containing many tons of photo grade silver and valuable polyester plastic material. Such used film is usually in the form of individual sheets or of elongated strips. At present several methods are used for recovering the silver, but no practical methods for recovering the polyester plastic material in an acceptable pure state exist. One prior art method for recovering the silver consists in burning the film and recovering the silver from the residue. The valuable polyester is, of course, destroyed. Another prior art method consists in chopping the film into small pieces and washing them in hot caustic or subjecting them to the action of an enzyme. This latter method recovers most of the silver. However, whenever one piece of film comes into contact with another piece of film there is a strong tendency for the pieces to stick together so that a high degree of agglomeration occurs. This not only inhibits the recovery of silver trapped between adhering surfaces but makes it virtually impossible to cleanse the individual pieces of polyester sufficiently to recover the polyester in a commercially pure state. Therefore, the polyester must be discarded, resulting in a significant economic loss.